IT is chiefly the laws of property which have enabled the few to accumulate vast wealth while the masses live in poverty. For many generations our laws have been framed with a view to the claims of property rather than the rights of man. For ages the money power has controlled legislation the world over, and, I am sorry to say, has exercised a controlling influence in our own land for many years. In the language of the Declaration of Independence: “All men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” If a man has an inalienable right to life, then he has a right to the means which sustain life, and of which he cannot be justly deprived by laws which permit one man, or set of men, to so absorb the means of life as not to leave sufficient to sustain the lives of all. If man has an inalienable right to liberty, then he cannot be justly deprived of liberty by another who assumes the right at his mere discretion to abridge it. If man has an inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness, then he cannot be justly deprived of that right by laws interposed in the way of its pursuit. Do such laws exist, and if so, how came they into existence? In Great Britain, whence we have derived most of our laws of property, the policy is to build up great estates. Hence, by the laws of that country, land descends to the eldest son, to the exclusion of the other children. The effect of this is to limit the ownership of land to a few persons. Thirty-four persons in that country own six million two hundred and eleven thousand acres of land. The Duke of Sutherland is said to own one million three hundred and fifty-eight thousand acres, and a few other dukes and earls own a great proportion of the land of the United Kingdom. What has brought about this wide difference in the ownership of land? Certainly the few who own the millions of acres, from which they derive revenue, in some instances of more than five hundred thousand dollars annually, in rentals, have not earned these vast estates by their own industry, but, on the contrary, it is by force of statutory enactments that these vast estates have been accumulated and perpetuated in few hands.